The BTN Group, publishers of Business Travel News, Travel Procurement and The Beat, has selected twelve companies to compete for the Business Travel Innovator Awards at the 5th Annual Innovate, the conference for the advancement of business travel.

Shep CEO and Co-founder Daniel Senyard was honored among 15 other leaders in the corporate travel space for his contributions to the evolution of modern business travel through Shep, an employee-focused open booking tool for business travel. Shep's mission is to bring low touch travel management to the unmanaged.

Shep Founder and CEO, Daniel Senyard will join Travel Tech Con 2018 as a judge in San Francisco this June. Senyard will join other leaders and innovators in the travel technology space for three days of pitches, demos, and collaboration surrounding the future of travel.

Ellen Keszler, former President of Travelocity Business, will join Shep's board of directors. Keszler will advise our Austin-based startup on best practices and strategies when offering business travel solutions to small to medium-sized businesses.

This is the story of how luck, networking, preparation and being at the right place at the right time got me onstage at SXSW with no notice, to pitch Steve Huffman, the CEO of Reddit and co-founder of Hipmunk.

Shep was selected to participate in MassChallenge Texas’ 2018 accelerator program. The company was one of over 520 startups to apply for the four-month accelerator located in Austin, Texas, and will join 84 other startups from across the state and around the world.

Texas Venture Labs accepted Shep into its Startup Accelerator program after applying with their business plan, investor pitch deck, and logo. Shep had to undergo interviews and to pitch their startups before being chosen by students for acceptance into the program.

Complai, the Austin-based makers of Shep, announced that the company had closed a $1.4 million seed funding round led by Moonshots Capital with participation from the Capital Factory, an Austin-based accelerator, and fund.

Shep was ranked as one of the 50 Austin Startups to watch in 2018 by Built in Austin. The annual list features startups less than five years old, but are poised to make significant impacts on the growing and changing tech community in Austin.